The oldest surviving version is a text and melody fragment of the first stanza, which appears in 1611 as part of a quodlibet in Melchior Franck's Fasciculus quodlibeticus.
[1][2] The current melody of the lullaby was composed by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in 1781 after a folk tune and also used for "Maikäfer flieg [de]" (cockchafer fly).
The currently known text version was distributed by the third volume of the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1808).
As a template for the first stanza was a Low German version of Johann Friedrich Schütze's Holstein Idioticon (1806),[3] the other stanzas are added poetry of Clemens Brentano.
Franz Magnus Böhme reprinted 36 text variants in 1897.